Edgar Kellogg is a bit of a loser. Once a fat kid and now a surly, unpopular adult who can't even muster any enthusiasm for his girlfriend, he has never got over his need to find a "Great Character" to look up to. Once upon a time, this Great Character was Toby Falconer, the popular kid in high school who laughed at Edgar's stretch marks. When Edgar gives up his successful law career to become a journalist, Falconer, now an award-winning foreign correspondent, gets him a gig with the National Record, covering the fictional region of Barba, a beard-shaped peninsula stuck on the bottom of Portugal.

Barba has a devastating westerly wind, a virtually inedible indigenous fruit called the hairy pear and a paramilitary organisation called the SOB. Edgar's predecessor – Barba's own Great Character, Barrington Saddler – has disappeared, leaving behind a group of journos with nothing to do but talk about how much more fun everything was when he was around. As a replacement, Edgar is disappointing. Until, that is, he discovers what is strongly hinted on the book's flap, that Saddler has rather more to do with the SOB than meets the eye. To save his own job, and to make himself a more interesting person, will Edgar follow the secret instructions that Saddler has left for him?

This preposterous, unengaging and extremely dull novel comes with an author's note explaining why it failed to find a publisher after its completion in 1998. Shriver attributes this to a "poisonous" sales record and an American ambivalence to books about terrorism (before 9/11, terrorism was, apparently, "Foreigners' Boring Problem"; afterwards, of course, the reverse), but it seems clear that in fact it wasn't published then because it is a bad book. It is still a bad book, but written by someone whose BookScan record, after the million-selling We Need to Talk About Kevin, forbids nothing. You can't entirely blame Shriver for the fact that this tiresome novel is appearing now. Almost everyone has written at least one bad book. But we should be able to rely on our publishers to tell us the truth about them, however much the sound ker-ching! is ringing in their ears.

Almost everything in this novel is predictable, except for the strange dialogue attributed to British characters. There's the Guardian journalist who says "innit" on one page and talks about "kitty litter" on another. The Independent correspondent, a nouveau riche from Southampton who inherited millions after his whole family was wiped out by the SOB, bizarrely explains at one point: "When you're flush you sort out that you right fancy stuff that's dirt cheap. Like bangers and beans – which is yards better with mealy forty-nine-P sausages than the posh sort with walnuts." This is surely the publishing equivalent of letting someone walk around with their dress tucked into their knickers. Shame on you, HarperCollins.

Journalists, we learn, are complicit in everything they ever report. Did you know, for example, that journalists couldn't even exist if it weren't for terrorists and mass murderers? (See We Need to Talk About Kevin for a more compelling version of the same argument.) Paperback editions of Kevin now typically end with Questions for Reading Groups along the lines of "Do you think Kevin was born evil or was it all his mother's fault?" The fact that there is no sensible alternative is what impoverished that novel. Here, there's no need to wait until the end to get the conversations going. On the flap, we are asked: "Who has the better life, the admirer or the admired?" Hm. See if you can guess. If you haven't worked it out by the middle of the first chapter, Toby Falconer, who by now has turned into a balding nobody, will answer it for you: "I had more friends than anyone at Yardley and I was so lonely I could scream." This tired old idea, that popularity is ultimately hollow, does not change over the course of the book; it is just repeated a lot. And it's not completely clear how it ties in with the "tongue in cheek" approach to terrorism or the frequent discussions about immigration.

It's a shame that this novel falls so flat. Shriver, particularly in the mode of Eva in Kevin, is capable of extraordinarily good writing – but that praise should not appear on the cover of this book.